Ricardo Martínez Murillo, Head of the Translational Neuroscience Department of the Spanish National Research Council, will speak about the drawings of Ramón y Cajal and his ability to transcend the limits established between Science and the Humanities.
Cajal creates scientific drawings on paper representing both cellular and connective anatomical features of the nervous system. He created immensely beautiful drawings using samples (histology sections) from several nervous tissue regions as his ‘model’. These were stained beforehand with special reagents (Golgi’s method is the most widely known), facilitating complete identification of the various cell components through an optical microscope.
The observations of this 1906 Nobel Prize winner are still valid, and he is considered the ‘father of modern neuroscience’. His drawings are a strict representation of his observations and were useful in disseminating his research, especially his masterpiece Histology of the nervous system of man and vertebrates, published for the first time between 1899 and 1904.
Cajal’s drawings are not artistic representations but rather a ‘portrait’ of reality. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci combined science and art in his studies of the human anatomy. Cajal blends science and art in the same way in his microscopic studies of the brain, creating remarkable and precise scientific drawings which contain extraordinary scientific information.
*The talk can be followed online at http://streaming.tabakalera.eu
Documentation
Ricardo Martínez Murillo will speak about the drawings of Ramón y Cajal and his ability to transcend the limits established between Science and the Humanities.